E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

Book Project

I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

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This site is built on a fresh trunk checkout of Django, running on Python 2.5.1, served by Apache and mod_python. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive.

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Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

International Freedom From Stupid Software Patents Day

LZW -- that is, the formerly patented Lempel-Ziv Welch compression algorithm -- is free today. The footnote on the Free Software Foundation's GIF history page says:

The Unisys patent expired on 20 June 2003 in the USA, in Europe it expired on 18 June 2004, in Japan the patent expired on 20 June 2004 and in Canada it expired on 7 July 2004. The U.S. IBM patent expired 11 August 2006, The Software Freedom Law Center says that after 1 October 2006, there will be no significant patent claims interfering with employment of the GIF format.

(Emphasis mine.) The patent they're referring to there is of course on LZW compression, not on GIF89a itself. LZW is used in other things, like TIFF compression, and, uh, V.42bis modems.

Once I understood the algorithm (David Mertz's *Text Processing in Python* has a good explanation of how it works), I thought, hey, that's really clever. Then I thought: that is what Unisys has been milking for patent royalties all these years?

I propose that today, October 1, become known as International Freedom From Stupid Software Patents Day. Let's celebrate.

Sunday, October 1st, 2006
+ + +
3 comments

Some related posts: Stallman Inside • Open source bounties • Uncovering dirt with Google code search • Rails security hole hullabaloo • Yahoo offers DRM-free music, sort of • Dangerous installers • Sony DRM news roundup • Sony gets spanked • The fall of Sony • Burn all JPEGs?
• Comment from James, 1 day later

Then I thought: that is what Unisys has been milking for patent royalties all these years?

Isn't inertia great? There really hasn't been any reason to use GIF for years -- PNG is better. The same issue exists with MP3 -- lossless formats with an open standard exist, but not enough people use them to change the defacto standard.

• Comment from Jessica, 3 days later

"There really hasn’t been any reason to use GIF for years — PNG is better."

PNG transparency is not supported by IE. There are javascript workarounds, etc, but they don't all work for every use.

Why is PNG better?

• Comment from Roy, 16 weeks later

Jessica...

IE can't handle pages that are actually W3 compliant code either.

It's IE that is crap.... not PNG

IE is another example of Inertia.

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